Get unlimited access to over 600,000 Kindle ebooks for $10 per month

How many times have you heard someone say the book is better than the movie? If you like to read, Amazon just made it easy to put that claim to the test with Kindle Unlimited, a $10 per month reading and listening subscription service that gives you unlimited access to more than 600,000 Kindle ebooks and thousands of Audible audiobooks. So, when you're finished watching a movie on Netflix, you can check if it's available on Kindle Unlimited and find out if your friend's claim is true.

Reader Store customers will transfer to Kobo

Just a few months after selling off its Vaio PC division, Sony will further reduce costs by shutting down its Reader Store. It will close for good on June 16, 2014, up to which time you can continue to shop and make purchases at the Reader Store. That may seem like a silly thing to do with a closure just more than a month away, however Sony says you'll receive an email from Kobo with a personalized link that will allow you to transfer your library over.

Apple finds itself in a legal pickle

U.S. District Judge Denise Cole has found Apple guilty of colluding with five major U.S. publishers to drive up prices of electronic books (e-books), saying that the company played a "central role" in the conspiracy. Damages will be determined at a new hearing in which Apple could end up owing millions of dollars, though in the meantime, the Cupertino company maintains its innocence and plans to appeal the ruling.

Attention, fellow muggles; you'll soon be able to get your fill of Harry Potter and his high-flying, Quidditch-playing Hogwarts buddies absolutely free -- at least if you own a Kindle and an Amazon Prime subscription. Today, Amazon announced that all seven of J.K. Rowling's blockbuster books are being added to the company's Kindle Owners' Lending Library as of June 19th.

Print media hasn't fared super well in the face of digital distribution. Turns out, a lot of people prefer live pixels to dead trees. So what's a company like Barnes & Noble -- with serious cash invested in both brick-and-mortar stores and the digital Nook ecosystem -- supposed to do in this new era of reading? The answer, apparently, lies in spinning off the Nook into an entirely new subsidiary company -- and giving Microsoft a 17.6 percent stake in the fresh venture. B&N did just that this morning.

The European Commission has launched a formal investigation and opened antitrust proceedings to determine if Apple and several international publishers colluded to fix prices of eBooks. Publishers named in the investigation include Hachette Livre, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, and Verlagsgrupe Georg von Holzbrinck.

It's hard to believe, but it's been a whole decade since VIA created the Mini-ITX form factor with the launch of its Mini-ITX VT6010. The rest is ongoing history, but what's really cool is how VIA is celebrating the occasion. It's doing so with the launch of its "Small is Beautiful: 10 Years of Mini-ITX" eBook, and while that might seem like a ho-hum read at first, it's not often that we're given an inside glimpse of things straight from the source.

Welcome to the world of digital media, a world where its inhabitants are constantly looking over the shoulder for fear of pickpockets. This fear is prevalent throughout the digital music industry, and apparently eBook publishers are just as skittish. In case we need to be reminded of this, just look at Penguin's recent departure from the OverDrive lending service.

Amazon's HTML5-based Kindle Cloud Reader lets you read your Kindle books in your Web browser, a neat idea that's hampered by lack of widespread support, including Internet Explorer and Firefox. Well, Amazon is still shunning Internet Explorer (or vice versa), but the Kindle Cloud Reader does now work with Mozilla Firefox, along with existing support for Chrome and Safari (on the iPad and desktop).

Amazon just upped the ante in the eBook reader wars by announcing a new benefit for Kindle owners with an Amazon Prime membership. It's called the "Kindle Owners' Lending Library," which is, well, a lending library for Kindle owners who are currently or plan to become members of Amazon's $79/year Prime service. The online library gives Prime members access to over 5,000 books to borrow for free, including over 100 current and former New York Times Bestsellers.